Yesterday, an ex-Microsoft employee was arrested for leaking trade secrets and internal Windows related software builds to a blogger. Court documents revealed that Microsoft snooped into Outlook/Hotmail accounts of the blog to crack down this case. Some news sites accused Microsoft for snooping customer’s (in this case blogger’s) email account. Their main argument was that while Microsoft has skewered rival Google for going through customer emails to deliver ads, it has now done the same. That’s a lame argument given the fact that this is a criminal case involving damages to Microsoft’s own properties. Microsoft responded initially with the following statement saying that Microsoft’s terms of service make clear our permission for this type of review, this happens only in the most exceptional circumstances. During an investigation of an employee we discovered evidence that the employee was providing stolen IP, including code relating to our activation process, to a third party. In order to protect our customers and the security and integrity of our products, we conducted an investigation over...

The rest of the story...
Microsoft News